The Burial
September 2012
There was something that caused me to flinch on first seeing this book. The cover’s almost numinous conflagration and skyscape was admittedly magnificent but the outline of a woman leading a horse across the plains caused a feeling of dread. Thankfully, this dissipated upon entering The Burial’s incandescent pages, for it is nothing like the feared rural romance. Instead it is akin to a lyrical passage to an underworld; a tale of bloody acts and bodies dead but unmuted, wherein a woman is hunted down like an animal.
Inspired by Jessie Hickman, a female bushranger born at the turn of the 20th century, and whose talents encompassed circus tricks and horse rustling, Courtney Collins’ debut novel enters into the realm of reimagining. The story is inventive in its narrative twists and contains an almost unbearably mesmeric narratorial voice. This extraordinary presence that shifts between howling, elegiac and mystical states heightens the novel’s Gothic tones. The reader cannot but be awed by the writer’s audacity: “I should not have seen the sky turn pink or the day seep in. I should not have seen my mother’s pale arms sweep up and heap wet earth upon me or the white birds fan out over my head. But I did.”
Death, in its various forms, is incessant. From the portentous outset, it appears to be closing in on Jessie, a woman whose extremity of character and action mirrors the unforgiving terrain in and around the Blue Mountains. Accused of murder, witchcraft and theft by her neighbours, the ample bounty on her head consequently brings forth all the area’s malcontents. A separate search party, harbouring very different intents, constitutes her lover, Aboriginal drover and tracker Jack Brown, and Sergeant Barlow, a man obsessed with her capture. The ensuing narrative is propulsive and darkly enthralling.
Collins expertly exposes the minds of those clawing at survival and redemption, much like Jack Brown’s prowess at killing and preparing a meal of rabbit. Deprivation is starkly depicted but countered by several strands of backstory that are lush in their detail, from the big top to a gorgeously teasing burlesque scene. The hallucinogenic nature that emerges with the conditions in the ranges is reminiscent of another inspired portrayal of Australians on the brink of life, Kevin Rabalais’ The Landscape of Desire. Here, too, the landscape is both oppressive in its vastness and cause for spiritual wonderment.
Jessie is a seductive character. The hardness of her carapace is not absolute. Although imprisoned first by the law and later by an abusive husband, she longs for innocence and grace, finding it temporarily when she encounters a band of boys in the mountains who evoke the Lost Boys and have formed their own idyllic world. Unlike those who pursue her, the exigencies of life have not succeeded in reducing her merely to a will to survive. As she struggles to evade death, accompanying her are phantoms of goodness; her beloved father and Bandy Arrow, a childhood circus partner.
The Burial channels Harry Houdini’s spirit through its escape acts and a grand instance of cattle rustling. His legend was more potent than the Australian female bushranger’s but both aroused highly emotional responses from the public. Collins executes some artful literary manoeuvres of her own in this tale that blazes with truth and mystery.
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